Lisa Avelleyra
Lisa is a lifelong lover of words and dictionary peruser. Once she discovered reading, she devoured anything she could get her hands on from the TV Guide to the Encyclopedia. On the shelves in her older sisters' bedroom, she discovered Nancy Drew, and the teen adventures of Marcy Rhodes, written by Rosamund du Jardin. From those same shelves, she plunged into heavier fare, teen pregnancy in "My Darling, My Hamburger" and teen drug addiction in the anonymous memoir "Go Ask Alice." Once she got her library card, she was able to fill in the holes of Nancy Drew's sleuthing cases and move on to a grown-up series, "The Bastard," "The Rebels," etc. by John Jakes. Cloaked in historical fiction, this series introduced Lisa to descriptive sex, provocative reading for a Catholic girl in a household where "that" subject was never discussed. In seventh grade, it was bestsellers, "Jaws" tucked into textbooks, furtive reading during class, "Rosemary's Baby" confiscated by principal Sister Catherina. Her natural affinity for the English language began to manifest itself, Lisa the one to beat in spelling races at the chalkboard. Called on by Sister Vivian, she loved diagramming sentences in front of the class. A woeful lack of self-awareness led to initially majoring in forestry, a creative writing class steering her toward journalism. She has a B.A. in Journalism from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and worked in newspapers for five years, column-writing being her favorite part of the job. Following that, Lisa worked in a bookstore for eight years, a dream job until corporate standardization sucked the joyous essence out of the store. Reading dwindled during the drinking years but now she's back at it, perpetually in the middle of a book, any book.
